Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

She pushed him with all she had and he landed very hard on the bed, hissing at residual pain in his bad left side. He looked up at her, a puzzlement moving on his face, and again he tried to talk, but she now cupped his mouth and shook her head and took off her shoes and pants, unbuttoned his shirt, his pants. Oh, those boxer briefs with the hole along the elastic, they broke her heart. His ribs were visible in his pale chest. His was a body having undergone terrific strain. She took four of his ties from the closet, remnants of his prep school boyhood, rarely worn now in his life. He laughed when she tied his wrists to the bed frame, though she felt sickly inside. Deadly. She knotted another tie into a blindfold. He made a strange noise, but she tied the fourth as a gag, and pulled it unnecessarily tight, the blue of the silk digging into his cheeks.

For a long time, she crouched above him, feeling powerful. She left her shirt on to hide her sunburn, the peeling skin; her face she’d explain by a long bike ride. She brushed the tip of him with her pelvis, gently, and at random. He started with every touch. He’d been reduced to this long body, so expectant, the eyes removed, the tongue removed. When he was panting behind his gag, she dropped onto him hard, not caring if it hurt him. She thought of — what? Scissors in fabric. It had been so long. It was so unfamiliar. The taut belly below her like the crisp top of crème brûlée. His face was red under the restraint; he was mouthing his fish mouth as if to free it, and she dug her fingernails into his waist, bringing up crescents of blood. His back arched off the mattress. The veins in his neck raised, blue.

He came before she did, and so she wouldn’t. It didn’t matter. She’d groped toward something in the dark and had somehow seized it back to her. She thought of the words she’d kept him from speaking, building up, mounting in him until there was unbearable pressure. And though she took the blindfold off, she left the gag, kissing his purple wrists. The way he looked at her now, with the silk darkened in an egg shape by spit, was quizzical. She leaned over and kissed him between the eyebrows. He held her loosely by the waist, and she waited until she knew he wasn’t going to say anything about what he had gone through and then untied the last tie on his mouth. He sat up and kissed the pulse under her chin. His warmth, she had missed it so. His body’s palette of stinks. He respected the silence. He rose and went to the bathroom to take a shower, and she went downstairs to boil some pasta. Puttanesca. She couldn’t resist the dig.

When he came down, he showed her the cuts she’d raised on his sides. “Wildcat woman,” he said, and there was a little sadness in the way he watched her now.

This should have been the end; this was not the end. She kept a Google search on Leo Sen. When, the week before Christmas, the terrible news of the boy’s drowning in the cold ocean rose on the screen, she’d felt startled. And then victory, hot and terrible, rose in her chest. She looked away from her own face in the reflection of the computer screen.

When Lotto was upstairs, buried in his new play, she went to Stewart’s and bought a newspaper. She saved it until the morning of Christmas Eve and put it at the mirror near the front door, where, she knew, Lotto would wait for Rachel and her wife and the children. He loved the holidays, as they matched the hot and jolly center of himself; he would be staring out the window to the country road impatiently and wouldn’t fail to see the paper. He would know then what it was that she knew. She heard him whistling and came out of the bedroom at the top of the stairs to watch. He smiled at himself in the mirror, checked his profile, and his hand fell on the paper. He looked more closely and began to read. He went pale, clutched the table beneath him as if he would faint. Rachel and Elizabeth were bickering when the back door opened and they came into the kitchen, and the children were shrieking with excitement, and the dog was screaming with happiness at the prospect of them. She’d saved the paper for right now, because with company he wouldn’t argue, he wouldn’t make things worse by saying them aloud, and if he didn’t say them immediately, he wouldn’t say them at all. Lotto looked up into the mirror and saw Mathilde on the stairs behind him.

She looked at him looking at her. A new understanding came into his face and then vanished; he was frightened by this glimpse of what was in her and wouldn’t watch it unfurl.

She took a step down the stairs. “Merry Christmas!” she called out. She was clean. Pine-scented. She descended. She was a child; she was as light as air.

—

WELCH DUNKEL HIER! sings Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio , an opera about a marriage.

Most operas, it is true, are about marriage. Few marriages could be called operatic.

What darkness here! is what Florestan sings.

—

NEW YEAR’S DAY was the only day in her life she believed in a god. [Ha.] Rachel and Elizabeth and the children still asleep upstairs in the guest room. Mathilde made scones, a frittata. Her life a long and endless round of entertaining.

She turned on the television. Turmoil in black and gold, a fire in the night. A shot of bodies under sheets, neat as tents on a plain; a building with arched windows, blackened and unroofed. Someone’s cell phone video just before the conflagration, a band on a stage shouting a countdown to the new year, sparklers spitting out fire, laughing faces. Now, outside, and people being helped to ambulances, lying on the ground. Devastated skin, charred and pink. The thought of meat inescapable. Mathilde felt a slow sickness overcome her. This place she recognized, she had been there just nights before. The press of bodies at the locked doors, the choking smoke, the screams. That juicy girl next to that big American man on the barstool. The bartender with the lush eyelashes, the shock of her cold hand on Mathilde’s skin. When she heard Rachel’s step on the top stair, she turned off the television, went quickly out into the backyard with God to compose herself in the cold.

That evening over dinner, Rachel and Elizabeth announced that Elizabeth was pregnant.

In bed, when Mathilde wept and wept, in gratitude and guilt and horror for all that she had escaped, Lotto thought it was because his sister was so rich with children and they were so terribly, unfairly poor. Later, he cried, too, into her hair. And the distance between them was bridged, and they were again united.

THE AIRPORT DEAFENED. Aurélie, eleven, alone, understood nothing. At last she saw the man holding the sign with her name on it and knew with a rush of relief that this must be her uncle, the much older brother of her mother. The child, the grandmother always said, of her wicked youth; though her old age was wicked as well. The man was jolly, round, red, full of sympathy. Already, she liked him.

“No, mamzelle ,” he said. “ Non oncle. The driver.”

She didn’t understand, so he pantomimed driving a car. She swallowed her disappointment.

“No parlez français ,” the driver said. “Except voulez-vous coucher avec moi .”

She blinked hard, and he said, “No, no, no, no, no. No vous. Excusez-moi. No voulez coucher avec vous .” He flushed redder and chuckled all the way to the car.

He stopped off the highway to buy her a strawberry milkshake; it cloyed and made her stomach hurt but she drank it all because it was kind of him. She was frightened of spilling on the leather seats and held the cup carefully all the way to her uncle’s house.

They stopped on a gravel drive. The house was a modest place for a man with a driver. Stern old Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse of impenetrable stone and ancient windows so bubbled they played tricks with the landscape beyond. The driver carried her bag up to her room, which alone was twice the size of her grandmother’s Paris apartment. In one wall was her own marble bathroom, with a green shower mat of such thickness it was like new spring grass in the park. She wanted to lie down on it immediately and sleep for days.